I have my fifth graders play Battleship to practice graphing points. Here is
how we play...
Blocking the top of my overhead projector from view, and turning it off, I
place five blue bingo chips on a coordinate grid. Students make guesses
about where they think my bingo chips are placed, and then take turns calling
out ordered pairs. I have a student record the guesses on the board, and I
mark each guess on the overhead with a red chip. When the students have used
up 10 guesses I turn the overhead on so they can see the number of red
"misses" and "purple" hits (because the red chip on the blue chip creates a
purple...)
Sometimes we play one team against another. Then one team uses red and the
other uses blue, and my chips are yellow.
I am careful to place my chips on ordered pairs that will tell me something
about what my students know about graphing... for example, (2, 2) won't
tell me much, because the student could begin with the wrong axis and still
get it correct. But (1, 4) wouldn't be the same spot if the Y-axis were the
first used, and neither would (6, 0).
Students can also be the ones at the overhead, once they get good at the
game.
-Gail, for the Teacher2Teacher service